Cycle-Aware Masked Self-Supervised Learning for Parkinson's Disease Diagnosis Using Wearable Time-Series Data in...

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a prevalent and progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Wearable sensors enable automated analysis of human activities in daily life, providing a promising solution for continuous monitoring of motor symptoms. However, the scarcity of labeled data limits the effectiveness of supervised learning approaches in this context. To address this limitation, we propose a novel cycle-aware masked self-supervised learning framework that leverages unlabeled wearable sensor data for pre-training. Unlike conventional masking strategies that operate on individual time points or random continuous spans, our method introduces cycle-level masking that exploits the intrinsic periodicity of human activities, encouraging the model to learn structured temporal representations aligned with motor patterns. Extensive experiments on real-world wearable datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised learning baselines across multiple clinical and non-clinical tasks. In particular, our method achieves 3%-5% absolute accuracy improvement over the strongest competing masking-based methods across clinical diagnostic tasks, and delivers consistent gains across multiple daily activity recognition settings. These results validate the effectiveness of incorporating cycle-aware inductive bias into self-supervised learning for time-series clinical analysis, highlighting its potential for improving PD diagnosis in real-world scenarios.